scholarly journals Fundamentalism and science

2006 ◽  
Vol 05 (02) ◽  
pp. C06
Author(s):  
Massimo Pigliucci
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Oxford Dictionary ◽  
The Many

The many facets of fundamentalism. There has been much talk about fundamentalism of late. While most people's thought on the topic go to the 9/11 attacks against the United States, or to the ongoing war in Iraq, fundamentalism is affecting science and its relationship to society in a way that may have dire long-term consequences. Of course, religious fundamentalism has always had a history of antagonism with science, and – before the birth of modern science – with philosophy, the age-old vehicle of the human attempt to exercise critical thinking and rationality to solve problems and pursue knowledge. “Fundamentalism” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences1 as “A movement that asserts the primacy of religious values in social and political life and calls for a return to a 'fundamental' or pure form of religion.” In its broadest sense, however, fundamentalism is a form of ideological intransigence which is not limited to religion, but includes political positions as well (for example, in the case of some extreme forms of “environmentalism”).

Who We Are: The Foundational Forces

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Sandro Galea
Keyword(s):  
Social Stigma ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Obesity Epidemic ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Many

This chapter examines the foundational forces that shape health. Even without a pandemic, the United States is faced with public health threats that are shaped by foundational forces. From the political and economic roots of the obesity epidemic, to the social stigma that informs the opioid crisis, to the many structural drivers of climate change, the social, economic, political, and demographic foundations of health are central to the challenges that must be addressed, nationally and globally, in the years to come. Engaging with these forces helped inform the response to COVID-19; they can help in addressing these other challenges as well. And just as a virus can have long-term effects on the body, the pandemic reshaped the societal foundations, with lasting implications for the economy, culture, attitudes towards core issues like race, politics, and more. Whether the experience of the pandemic leads to significant long-term benefits will depend on whether Americans retain the hard lessons of that moment and apply them to foundational forces.

Land-use Planning: One Geologist's Viewpoint

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
E-An Zen
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
Current Source ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
A Current

Planning for the best use of land and its resources should take fully into consideration the long-term consequences of each type of use in order to stretch out most beneficially the well-being of society in the future, and to protect the integrity of the land and its biota. Three kinds of land-use can be distinguished for planning purposes. Reversible land-use leaves the land, after use, essentially as it was before; little or no man-induced modification remains. An example of reversible use in the United States is the designation of certain public lands as Wilderness. Terminal land-use commits the land to a chosen particular use, and any attempt at reversal requires either time-scales that are long compared with the expected lifespan of the social and political institution, or a commitment of resources that is too high for society to consider worth bearing. Examples of terminal land-use are location of metropolises and sites of toxic and/or radioactive waste disposals; by its nature the list grows monotonically. A current source of some social tension arises from the fact that Wilderness designation appears to assign a terminal-use status by legislative fiat, whereas in fact the land is being used reversibly.

scholarly journals White Conceptions of Racial Hierarchy: Temporary versus Permanent Preferences

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-65
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gayles ◽  
Sarah Tobin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Context Specific

Ideas of race, racial identity, and racial categorization, reflect the inconsistent, context-specific and fluctuating nature of racial meaning (Nagel, 1986; Forbes, 1990; Davis, 1991; Nagel, 1994; Haney-Lopez, 1995; Ignatiev, 1995; Kibria, 1996,1998; Niven & Zilber, 2000; Morning, 2001; Lacy, 2004). Studies of racial hierarchy, specifically, enable an understanding of not only the social construction of race, but also the manner in which ideas of race operate to influence human reality.” Within the United States, race “permeates the lives of the native-born and immigrants alike” (Bashi & McDaniel, 1997, p. 686, see also Bashi, 1998). More specifically, a continuum between white and black persists and is a critical conceptual schema grounding the many manifestations of racism in the United States. This white-to-black continuum is hierarchical as well with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom (Feagin, 2000, p. 220). While the specific history of the United States facilitates this hierarchy, it has also been found beyond the borders of the United States (Small, 1994, Twine, 1998).

Philosophcal review of h. white̕s tropological theory in the context of the new philosophy of history

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Text Organization ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Material ◽  
The Common ◽  
Historical Nature ◽  
Selection Of

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.

Minimal Morality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Moehler
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Moral Pluralism ◽  
Moral Diversity ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Restricted Form ◽  
Pluralistic Societies ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Just Society

This book develops a novel multilevel social contract theory that, in contrast to existing theories in the liberal tradition, does not merely assume a restricted form of reasonable moral pluralism, but is tailored to the conditions of deeply morally pluralistic societies that may be populated by liberal moral agents, nonliberal moral agents, and, according to the traditional understanding of morality, nonmoral agents alike. To develop this theory, the book draws on the history of the social contract tradition, especially the work of Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Rawls, and Gauthier, as well as on the work of some of the critics of this tradition, such as Sen and Gaus. The two-level contractarian theory holds that morality in its best contractarian version for the conditions of deeply morally pluralistic societies entails Humean, Hobbesian, and Kantian moral features. The theory defines the minimal behavioral restrictions that are necessary to ensure, compared to violent conflict resolution, mutually beneficial peaceful long-term cooperation in deeply morally pluralistic societies. The theory minimizes the problem of compliance by maximally respecting the interests of all members of society. Despite its ideal nature, the theory is, in principle, applicable to the real world and, for the conditions described, most promising for securing mutually beneficial peaceful long-term cooperation in a world in which a fully just society, due to moral diversity, is unattainable. If Rawls’ intention was to carry the traditional social contract argument to a higher level of abstraction, then the two-level contractarian theory brings it back down to earth.

Across and Down

1939 ◽  
Vol 8 (24) ◽  
pp. 129-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. P. Austin
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
The United States ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Crossword Puzzle ◽  
Casual Reader ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oxford Dictionary ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
Good Standard ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

The casual reader, on seeing these lines, might be forgiven for the thought that Lord Byron had the crossword puzzle in mind when he wrote them. In an uncertain world nothing is more certain than that this was not the case. Byron died in 1824. The crossword puzzle was born, at least in its popular modern shape, almost precisely a century later. Its history begins suddenly. Neither in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1921, nor in the twelfth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1922, does the crossword appear at all. But from the year 1923 references to it become increasingly frequent. In 1924 a popular work entitled The Crossword Puzzle Book was published. In 1925 there was a reference to crosswords in Punch. In 1926 the thirteenth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica had a short article on it. In 1928 the crossword puzzle was mentioned in Galsworthy's Swan Song. From that time every good standard dictionary or work of reference has included it. These facts document its emergence as a literary phenomenon in Great Britain. The history of the crossword in the United States is very similar, except that it would appear to have achieved stardom in the popular firmament a few months earlier in that country than in this.

Promoting astronomy in developing countries: an historical perspective

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (SPS5) ◽  
pp. 21-24
Author(s):  
Rajesh Kochhar
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Area ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Deficiency Syndrome ◽  
Multi Stage ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Astronomical Instrument

AbstractAny international effort to promote astronomy world wide today must necessarily take into account its cultural and historical component. The past few decades have ushered in an age, which we may call the Age of Cultural Copernicanism. In analogy with the cosmological principle that the universe has no preferred location or direction, Cultural Copernicanism would imply that no cultural or geographical area, or ethnic or social group, can be deemed to constitute a superior entity or a benchmark for judging or evaluating others.In this framework, astronomy (as well as science in general) is perceived as a multi-stage civilizational cumulus where each stage builds on the knowledge gained in the previous stages and in turn leads to the next. This framework however is a recent development. The 19th century historiography consciously projected modern science as a characteristic product of the Western civilization decoupled from and superior to its antecedents, with the implication that all material and ideological benefits arising from modern science were reserved for the West.As a reaction to this, the orientalized East has often tended to view modern science as “their” science, distance itself from its intellectual aspects, and seek to defend, protect and reinvent “our” science and the alleged (anti-science) Eastern mode of thought. This defensive mind-set works against the propagation of modern astronomy in most of the non-Western countries. There is thus a need to construct a history of world astronomy that is truly universal and unselfconscious.Similarly, the planetarium programs, for use the world over, should be culturally sensitive. The IAU can help produce cultural-specific modules. Equipped with this paradigmatic background, we can now address the question of actual means to be adopted for the task at hand. Astronomical activity requires a certain minimum level of industrial activity support. Long-term maintenance of astronomical equipment is not a trivial task. There are any number of examples of an expensive facility falling victim to AIDS: Astronomical Instrument Deficiency Syndrome. The facilities planned in different parts of the world should be commensurate with the absorbing power of the acceptor rather than the level of the gifter.

The National Data Center and the Rise of the Data Double

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 627-636
Author(s):  
Dan Bouk
Keyword(s):  
Life Insurance ◽  
Data Center ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
National Data ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Economy

A mid-1960s proposal to create a National Data Center has long been recognized as a turning point in the history of privacy and surveillance. This article shows that the story of the center also demonstrates how bureaucrats and researchers interested in managing the American economy came to value personal data stored as “data doubles,” especially the cards and files generated to represent individuals within the Social Security bureaucracy. The article argues that the United States welfare state, modeled after corporate life insurance, created vast databanks of data doubles that later became attractive to economic researchers and government planners. This story can be understood as helping to usher in our present age of personal data, one in which data doubles have become not only commodities, but the basis for a new capitalism. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

Within-field Pathogenic Diversity of Phytophthora sojae in Commercial Soybean Fields in Iowa

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison E. Robertson ◽  
Silvia R. Cianzio ◽  
Sarah M. Cerra ◽  
Richard O. Pope
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Phytophthora Sojae ◽  
Soil Samples ◽  
Soybean Plant ◽  
North Central Region ◽  
North Central ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Pathogenic Diversity

Phytophthora root and stem rot (PRR), caused by the oomycete Phytophthora sojae, is an economically important soybean disease in the north central region of the United States, including Iowa. Previous surveys of the pathogenic diversity of P. sojae in Iowa did not investigate whether multiple pathotypes of the pathogen existed in individual fields. Considering the many pathotypes of P. sojae that have been reported in Iowa, we hypothesized multiple pathotypes could exist within single fields. In the research reported herein, several soil samples were collected systematically from each of two commercial fields with a history of PRR in Iowa, and each soil sample was baited separately for isolates of P. sojae. Numerous pathotypes of P. sojae were detected from both fields. As many as four pathotypes were detected in some soil samples (each consisting of six to eight soil cores), which suggests that a single soybean plant could be subjected to infection by more than one pathotype. This possibility presents important implications in breeding resistant cultivars and in the management of PRR. Accepted for publication 14 July 2009. Published 8 September 2009.

scholarly journals The Many Faces of Child Emotional Maltreatment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Ami Rokach ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Child Abuse ◽  
Emotional Abuse ◽  
Developmental Outcomes ◽  
Emotional Maltreatment ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
The Many ◽  
Physical And Sexual Abuse

Emotional maltreatment is a form of child abuse that may leave no physical scars, but has deep and long-term consequences. When compared to the effects of physical and sexual abuse, its impact has been historically neglected by researchers, despite its existence in all other forms of maltreatment. Beyond its recipient, the alarming effects of emotional abuse are believed to overcome even trans-generational barriers within the household. This poses great risks to the developmental outcomes of children having undergone these circumstances and their future kin. As such, this brief review will describe the signs of emotional maltreatment, its effects, and what can be done to address it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document